April 1999

This page copyright 1999 The Shrubbery
Webmaster: Jason Morrison

The Shrub Primer: Oxymorons and Paradoxes

Many people often wonder how to tell the difference between a paradox and
an oxymoron. There's no quick and easy rule, like with alligators and
crocodiles, but with a few examples I think I can show that anyone can tell
the two apart.

Oxymorons are phrases that, though used often, contradict themselves.
Examples include "jumbo shrimp," "real imitation leather," and "military
intelligence." Notice that oxymorons always consist of at least two words;
that's a good way to tell if something is an oxymoron.

The best rule of thumb is to look at the first word and then the second
and see if they mean two completely different things. Keep in mind they
must be opposites-"red" and "coat" mean two different things, but "red
coat" is not an oxymoron. Other correct examples include "icy hot,"
"hottie-coldy," "second baseman" and "Michael Jackson's Thriller."

Paradoxes are much, much different, in that they often require many words,
even a whole paragraph to explain them. Paradoxes are much more dangerous
than oxymorons. Many movies have been made about paradoxes destroying the
universe but none about oxymorons hurting even one person even a little.

The best source for information about paradoxes is Star Trek.
Counting
both the original series and the next generation, the crew of the
Enterprise have destroyed well over 200 computers, robots and androids by
using paradoxes. Paradoxes might confuse people, but they outright destroy
robots. Here's one example.

Did you catch the paradox? If Mudd always lies, then when he says he's
lying, he must be telling the truth. But he can't tell the truth, so he
must be lying, in which case he was telling the truth about lying in the
first place. It is easy to see how computers and robots are easily
destroyed by such things. Some might think another paradox is: why did the
androids believe Kirk if they were trying to capture him? Couldn't he have
just said, "All androids are now broken" to the same effect? The answer
is: that is not a paradox.

There are many more examples of this same thing. When the next generation
crew found a lost Borg that they named Hugh, they planned to send him back
to the collective with a geometric figure that is a paradox. They showed
it on a screen for a second, but I didn't get a good look at it, so we'll
just have to take Geordi's word on it this time.

Please don't confuse paradoxes with the two other ways of destroying
robots, computers and androids: getting them to fall in love or smashing
them. There have been numerous cases of Kirk getting android women to fall
in love with him so they spark, shudder and malfunction. Also, one time a
maniacal computer had the ship trapped and Kirk asked it, "what is love?"
and it broke because it was not a human being with thoughts and feelings,
but a machine. In the next generation we found out that even
father-daughter love can destroy androids when Data created his daughter,
Lol. She loved her dad and then died. Luckily Data didn't have feelings
at that point, or he would have probably died too. We know he did not die
when he had sex with Tasha Yarr, though she died later and may have been a
robot, we'll never know.

And of course there is the ever-popular smashing them. This does not
always work-- it's usually a good way to defeat a computer (unless the
computer has an impenetrable force field) but quite often does not work
against androids. Androids are often much stronger and more resilient than
humans so if you've just toppled a bunch of crates onto an android, watch
out! He will probably throw one of the crates at you.

I hope this little exercise has been of some help. With more experience,
you will find more examples of both. The more examples you find, the more
experience you will have with paradoxes and oxymorons. (Did you catch the
paradox?)

Aloha! (Which is the only one-word oxymoron, meaning both hello and
goodbye).